


Half as Clear as Reason

by micehell



Category: Velvet Goldmine
Genre: AU (X-Files Fusion), Drama, Ickiness, M/M, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-10
Updated: 2011-12-10
Packaged: 2017-11-12 00:33:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/484646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/micehell/pseuds/micehell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the basement, he could loosen his tie a little bit.  He could have his <i>Weekly World News</i> articles taped to the wall, pictures of Elvis and his two-headed alien baby cradled like a joke in between the Nessies and the specters that might all be true.  In the basement, the tattoo on his forehead might say <i>I Want To Believe</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Half as Clear as Reason

**Author's Note:**

> There's one thread of the plot that doesn't get answered, and this was because there was supposed to be a little tag at the end that wrapped it up. But it turned out I liked the last line enough that I didn't want to lose it to another last line, so there you go. I don't think many of you will find it bothersome enough to worry with. ;)
> 
> Title from Tool's _Undertow_

Even though it was supposed to be a punishment, Arthur liked the basement.

When he'd worked upstairs, it was all buttoned-down and repressed, everyone wearing ultra-professional like a mask, not a thing out of place, not an agent that didn't look exactly like every other one. He figured if the FBI could think of a way to make it a requirement for all their agents to tattoo _I would never ever resort to entrapment or cross-dress_ on their foreheads, they'd do it in a second.

But in the basement, he could loosen his tie a little bit. He could have his _Weekly World News_ articles taped to the wall, pictures of Elvis and his two-headed alien baby cradled like a joke in between the Nessies and the specters that might all be true. In the basement, the tattoo on his forehead might say _I Want To Believe_ instead.

He knew he'd only been allowed to have the basement at all because of his investigative abilities. They'd wanted to just sweep him out the door, his weird ideas and near obsession reminding them of Hoover in some ways, reminding them of the fact he was _not like them_ in most ways. But he'd always had an ability to sift through a chaos of data and extrapolate information that others missed time and again. When he'd found Tommy Stone just three days after he'd been brought in on the case, when the others had been looking for Keith Slade for ten years, he had finally made the kind of name for himself that meant everyone knew who he was.

And no one wanted to work with him.

Hence the basement, where Arthur could read supermarket rags and call it research, could follow up on cases that had only blurry photos and hysterical witness accounts as evidence, and, more importantly, where Arthur could be alone.

Which was why being assigned a new partner was the pits. He'd tried to fight it, but they'd paid no more attention to him about that than they had about his insistence that aliens were real.

It wasn’t that he had anything against the man. He'd never met him, after all. He'd just… heard about him. Cynical, sarcastic, and about as likely to stick to the dress code as he was to fly (which Arthur was pretty sure he couldn't, though he didn't entirely dismiss it out of hand). From what he'd heard, Curt Wild was only still in the FBI for the same reason that Arthur was in the basement instead of the unemployment line: he was damn good at his job.

So good at his job that even though he'd gotten his degree much later than most new recruits, and even though he'd had a certain amount of infamy already attached to his name, the FBI had actively sought to recruit him. Much like Arthur's slam dunk with Tommy Stone, Wild's ability to profile, to see right down into motivations that most people would rather pretend didn't exist, had helped him solve the Shannon Hazelbourne case, splashing his name over the headlines for the second time in his life. Which had pissed the FBI off, and at the same time given him the same sort of job security that Arthur's almost unnatural ability at data mining gave him.

Arthur was pretty sure that, even with all that, it was the fact that Wild was openly gay that had gotten him assigned down to the basement with the FBI's other dirty secret. That way they'd have him on call when they needed him, but the automatons upstairs wouldn't have to worry about their virtue the rest of the time.

And, oddly enough, considering how little they agreed about most things, the gay thing was the reason that Arthur really didn't want to work with Wild, either. Not that he objected to homosexuality, of course; even though he was as buttoned-down and repressed about his own sexuality as the Bureau could wish for him to be, it wasn't like he wanted to throw stones about it, either. It was just that Wild was openly gay and _amazingly attractive_ at the same time, and Arthur had guiltily torn down the picture of the man (wearing leather and glitter and howling at the moon) he'd had pasted right next to Elvis and his offspring when he'd heard who his new partner was going to be.

He admired Wild's job skills. He admired his bravery in being out in this bastion of ultra-conformity. But he also admired Curt, the fantasy that Arthur had entertained far too often in his own little bastion of repression, and Arthur, safe in his basement, really didn't want the distraction.

~*~

Arthur's resolve to keep things as professional as possible had nearly folded at his first view of Wild. The pictures hadn't done him justice, with the non-regulation hair curling silkily around his ears and the eyes that seemed like a kaleidoscope of colors; the blue of his shirt, the green of the walls. Strong hands with black painted thumbnails shook Arthur’s in an easy handshake that invited a lack of formality. The elegant black silk tie, with the little silver laughing death heads that danced across it, was a gentle mock against the very professionalism that Arthur was trying to hold onto with everything he had.

But it wasn't until Curt called him on his stiltedly polite getting-to-know-you questions with a wry laugh and a, "Do you really want me to believe that you, a highly trained FBI agent, with a reputation for an eye for details, doesn't know all about me," that Arthur felt the resolve give way completely.

He laughed himself, realizing how doomed he'd been from the start, and admitted with a small shrug, "I know what I read, anyway." Even with Arthur's willingness to believe in some odd things, he doubted that most of it was true. "Supposedly you were raised by wolves after your parents, which from at least two accounts were an alien and Amelia Earhart, were taken back to the mother ship and you were left behind. So if that's all true, then you're right, I do know all about you."

Wild just looked at him for a moment, then grinned, a lopsided thing, half amusement, half self-deprecation. "You've got it all, then," he said quietly.

Then he shrugged, seeming to shake it all off, and pulled out a folder that he'd apparently stuffed into the waist of his pants. He waggled it at Arthur, and said, "Come on, we've got a plane to catch. We need to be in New York before twelve tonight."

"Why?"

Curt smirked, sarcasm oozing out of every pore. "Otherwise we'll miss the ghost, of course."

Arthur had a lot of questions, but they hit all at the same time, none of them managing to get out except a strangled, "What?"

Curt had already turned and was walking towards the door of Arthur's office, making for the world outside the safety of Arthur's basement. "Come on, you'll see. I'll fill you in on the plane."

Though he didn't turn back, he stopped at the door for a second, voice studiedly light when he said, "My mother wasn't Amelia Earhart, though. I just thought you should know… it was David Bowie."

Arthur heard his laughter floating back down the hallway, and he smiled in turn as he grabbed his things. He'd read that one, too.

~*~

New York was as crowded, dirty, and exhausting as Arthur remembered it being. He'd gone there when he'd first arrived in the US, eighteen and desperate to be anybody but Arthur Stuart from Manchester. He'd started off meaning to be a reporter, and had been studying journalism at City when a chance meeting with a recruiter had put him on a different path instead. Ten years later, as a FBI agent with an impressive string of solved cases and no social life to speak of, Arthur had to admit that all he'd really managed to do was become Arthur Stuart from DC, instead.

Arthur Stuart from DC, who was in a hotel room with Curt Wild, and doing his best to pretend he was perfectly straight. With Curt Fucking Hot Wild, who was sitting on the bed, down to a rumpled dress shirt and jeans, bare feet pulled up on the mattress while he used his knees as a headrest, copies of confusing forensics reports being crumpled under his slightly stubbled, and very cleft chin, and not making it at all easy for Arthur to be anything but the very gay, very horny man he was.

He focused on the case file he’d been given to distract himself before he wound up doing anything too embarrassing. It was helpful, because regardless of what some of his former coworkers might believe of him, dead bodies were a definite turnoff.

The photos in the file came in pairs; one set taken by the crime scene techs, one set by the killer. The victims on their knees, hands locked in prayer, live eyes pleading for mercy made up one set, macabrely mirrored by the set with the victims locked in instantaneous rigor, dead eyes still praying for a mercy that hadn’t come.

Arthur shuddered in atavistic fear. He was far too familiar with seeing people who’d died alone and terrified, but he would never be reconciled to it. On the nights he actually bothered to go home to his lonely, sterile apartment, he sometimes dreamed that he’d died that way himself and just hadn’t realized it yet. He looked at the haunted eyes and said without thinking, “They look like they’ve seen a ghost.”

He hadn’t actually meant anything by that. It’d just been an emotional response, not an analysis, but he still expected Curt to shoot it down. It wouldn’t be the first time someone he worked with dismissed his ideas out of hand, and Arthur braced himself for it.

Curt just shrugged, the forensics report under his chin getting more crumpled as he did it. “The guy from the _Independent News Service_ wants to name him The Gotham Ghost. Lucky for us, he only knows about two of the killings, so no one’s paying him any attention. Since the FBI was on the case from the beginning, they’ve managed to keep a blanket on most of it, so except for one slightly loco reporter who no one really takes seriously and who fucking sucks at naming serial killers, we’ve been saved from a lot of the shit that goes around with these types of cases. What we haven’t been saved from is that the killer himself seems to be saying he’s a ghost, and that he’s just as bad at writing as the reporter.”

Arthur knew a lot of agents would have been sniping at Curt about his language, even the post-Hoover FBI wanting to appear clean-cut and aboveboard, but it actually made Arthur feel more at ease, reminding him that this agent wasn’t one that was going to balk when Arthur didn’t stick to the manual either. So instead Arthur just said, “I won’t tell Carl what you said about him next time I talk to him, though I do have to say that sometimes his writing is just a little… lurid.”

He agreed with Curt about the killer sucking at writing when he read the copies of the notes that had been pinned, after death, to the victims’ praying hands. It was the same note on each of the four victims, written on plain, cheap paper, in common ballpoint ink and a childish scrawl: _Hidden in sight, plain as air. You can’t catch what isn’t there._

“Christ, is our killer five or something?”

Curt laughed. “He’s definitely trying to make it hard to profile him, but the bad writing, both what he wrote and how he wrote it, are obvious put-ons, and about as much of a giveaway as his real writing would be.”

Arthur nodded, knowing that much about profiling himself. But it did make him wonder, if the case was this straightforward, why had the Bureau’s two least wanted agents been called in on it?

As if reading his mind, Curt went on. “What makes it freaky, though, is that he really does seem to be a ghost. The fact that there’s no physical evidence left behind on either the victims or the scene might just be someone who’s careful, but then there’s the cadaveric spasm. Since the Bureau was involved from the beginning, it’s been our ME each time, and he’s been stumped on that one.”

Curt stood up, stretching, his shirt riding up to show his navel and a faint hint of the hair leading down from it, but Arthur very determinedly looked at his copies of the ME’s report, broken down into the USA Today _News Made Easy_ -style format the Bureau had come to love after all the double-speak that used to be the standard.

 _Cadaveric spasm, also known as instantaneous rigor, found in each of the four victims. A rare occurrence in any case, it’s usually limited to one part of the body, especially the hands if the victim were clutching something when they died, but in each case here it was found throughout the body. No sign of what may have caused the phenomenon, though since each victim died of a heart attack induced by an massive overdose of epinephrine, it might be related to the overstimulation of the fight or flight syndrome. That_ each _victim had it, though, should be statistically impossible, since the exact cause of cadaveric spasm is unknown._

Notes from the supervisory agent in charge of the case were in the file, too, and Arthur grimaced when he saw the name, but just kept reading. But the SAC was just as confused as the ME. They had determined the cause of death in each case, obviously, but had never found the original crime scene. The victims themselves were all unidentified, none of their fingerprints on file and no ID or missing person alert out on any of them. A canvass of the local homeless populations and the hookers that worked the various areas hadn’t turned up anyone who’d known them either. It was as if they’d sprung up whole, if dead, from thin air.

Adding to the mystery, the killer had directly called the FBI field office each time, a recorded message with electronic distortion masking the voice, to let them know when and where the body would turn up, but in each case there was no sign of how the body had got there and never any witnesses to the dump, even though all four sites had been on the tops of buildings in at least moderately trafficked parts of the city. And to make things even more confusing, on the last body they’d actually had fifteen minutes leeway to get to the site before the time the killer had given them, but even though an initial search had turned up nothing, a later search, after the set time, had found the body easily, the victim kneeling stiffly in premature rigor, right out in plain sight.

Even knowing that it was unlikely that anyone but him (and Carl if he’d had all the details) really believed it could be a ghost, Arthur felt a little thrill of excitement run through him, like a dog that had caught the scent. He looked up at Curt, immune for the moment to how pretty the eyes that met his were. “Four weeks between each victim and tonight’s the fourth week since the last one? We really might have missed the ghost if we hadn’t taken that last flight.”

Curt laughed, apparently amused by both Arthur’s growing enthusiasm and by his calling the killer a ghost. A born cynic (or perhaps a created one, if even some of the stories about his childhood were true), Curt couldn’t help but offer some caution. “Just because no one’s figured out the method this guy is using yet, doesn’t make the whole thing supernatural. And considering the Bureau’s been all over this one from the beginning, and considering your, hmmm, unique position in the organization, not to mention mine… well, there’s at least an okay chance we were called in on this to make us look bad.”

Arthur’s mind was on the ghost, his own suspicious nature still not quite holding him back from thinking of the killer as one, but even so he felt another little thrill pass through him at Curt linking himself with Arthur vs the Bureau. Part of it was probably just Curt’s pragmatism, since if this was a plan to discredit them on someone’s part, it was likely to take them both out, but part of it was that Curt seemed genuinely okay with Arthur’s rather odd outlook on things, just as he’d seemed genuinely at ease with his own less than Bureau-like reputation, apparently not minding (or being far too used to) being on the outside looking in.

Curt was still laughing and Arthur was still thinking about it when the phone rang.

~*~

The new dump site turned up just as much nothing as the previous four had. Either the killer had gotten more cautious, or his chosen site was just randomly further out than the last one had been, but either way they hadn’t even been able to get anyone up on the roof of the building until after the time the killer had given. The victim was waiting for them when they’d arrived, body frozen in prayer and face frozen in fear, and Arthur could almost imagine the man was rebuking them for getting there too late.

Arthur already knew who the SAC on the case was, having seen it on the reports, so he managed to keep the grimace off his face when he met Calderon in person. They’d once worked together fairly well, when Arthur had still investigated the more usual cases. But Calderon had been working the Stone case from the beginning, and hadn’t been any too pleased when a mere SA had solved his ten year old case in just three days. He’d been even less pleased when Arthur had been transferred to DC; a promotion in everything but rank, while Calderon, who’d actually had the rank and had been bucking for the assignment, had been kept at the field office in New York instead.

He wasn’t any happier to see Arthur now than Arthur was to see him. “DC said they were sending someone down. Should have guessed it would be the Bureau’s very own Van Helsing.”

Arthur just looked at him blankly, used to the slurs and knowing he’d only get too excited and gain nothing from it by sniping back, but Curt gave Arthur a considering look, cocking his head doubtfully as he said to Calderon, “There’s no way he’s an Abraham. A Murray, maybe, or even a Bob, but Abraham is just a no.”

Calderon looked like he was chewing on lemons, shooting Curt a baleful look, but he turned back to Arthur without taking it any further, getting down to the case instead. “This one’s the same as all the others. We’re still doing the usual door knocks and canvass, but it’s unlikely it’ll turn up anything new at this point. Whoever this asshole is, he knows what he’s doing.”

After that unhelpful bit of reporting, he left them to the care of his second, SSA Keith, who shrugged apologetically and said, “The killer’s not the only asshole around, but SSA Calderon is right about our having nothing at this point. If you guys could have a look at things… maybe you could work your magic for us and find something we could go on.” He paused, reluctant to say anything more, but then grimaced and added, “I know Calderon can be hard to deal with, and he’s a little bit obsessed with you, Stuart, but I for one am glad you’re here. Maybe I don’t believe in all that UFO and ghost stuff you’re supposed to be into, but I have no explanations for any of this, either.”

He left after that, headed back to the office to coordinate the tip lines they’d started setting up after the second victim, leaving Arthur and Curt to pull the rabbit out of the hat. Unfortunately they had not much more to go on than anyone else. Curt stood back and tried to read the gestalt of the scene that had been staged with the victim, and Arthur knelt in front of him, strangely mirroring the vic as he did a detailed inspection of the body, looking for any little thing that might be out of place.

Arthur nearly had his head buried in the victim’s pocket, not even finding lint, when he heard Curt’s laugh above him. “You’re very thorough, aren’t you?”

Arthur shrugged, not sure if he was defending himself or simply providing information when he answered, “It’s my strong suit. An attention to detail that others tend to miss. Well, and the fact that I’m willing to consider things they wouldn’t for the most part. Like David Bowie being your mother.”

He looked up at Curt, wondering what he’d get in answer, and wasn’t disappointed when Curt laughed again. His answering smile, though, turned into a bemused look when Curt jumped up on the wall that ran along the edge of the roof, only some safety railing and a good sense of balance keeping him from going over. Curt’s eyes had a faraway look in them, as if he were seeing some other place or some other time, but he was still in the present enough to bemuse Arthur even further by saying, “You’re kind of cute when you’re excited over ghosts.”

Pleasure and embarrassment both made Arthur’s cheeks flame red, but he was saved from figuring out how to answer that by finding a partially opaque viscous substance in the hem of the victim’s pants leg. Even through the latex gloves he was wearing, he could feel how slick it was, not unlike lube (though he really didn’t need his mind going there), but the look was wrong, more like liquid powder than anything else. He sniffed at his gloves, trying to divorce the latex smell from whatever else might be there, but it was faint, just a hint of a sharp smell, like heated metal or maybe even sulfur.

It certainly wasn’t like anything Arthur had ever seen before, and he felt a small flutter in his stomach at the thought of what it might be, that was only somewhat ruined by Curt refusing to let him call it ectoplasm. “At least until the lab makes sure it isn’t just some homemade version of Ben-Gay or something.”

~*~

It turned out the lab was pretty sure that it wasn’t the homemade version of Ben-Gay, but that was about all they were sure of. A semi-organic compound, but there were components they couldn’t identify (though a nod to Arthur’s nose on the sulfur). Definitely _Things They’d Never Seen Before_ , which made it right up Arthur’s alley, and the somewhat straight-laced techs were happy enough to let Arthur do the grunt work on the research.

It was time-consuming, somewhat tedious work, even for Arthur who didn’t mind that sort of thing. And though the FBI had been steadily working over the last few years to create computer databases that would be accessible by both the agents in the field and other law enforcement agencies through a phone-transmitted connection, it was still in the early stages, and there was far too much that hadn’t been cataloged yet. So Arthur had to research things the old fashioned way: the field office’s large reference library, a backache’s worth of time spent poring over card files and little used texts, and avoiding Calderon whenever he could (or at least trying to keep it professional when he couldn’t).

It left him little time to notice things that didn’t have to do with what could potentially be ectoplasm, but somehow Curt always seemed to know when he needed a break from his research all the same. A well-timed pizza for elevenses, coffee during the afternoon fog that always hit around 3, and the constant slinkily leaning up against walls Curt did when he was talking with the other agents.

The last part was a distraction in two ways. For one, even though he obviously wasn’t as familiar with profiling as Curt was, Arthur was still pretty sure that there was more to it than hanging around the office playing part-time gopher to Arthur and full-time gossip with the others. Even through the (perhaps more than slightly) obsessive focus Arthur tended to get in research mode, it impinged on his awareness that Curt was paying more attention to the people around him than he was to the case. It bothered Arthur almost as much as the second way he was distracted by it, which was how flirty Curt tended to be while gossiping, and the slinky thing, and the way the non-regulation jeans he wore tended to mold over his hips when he canted them playfully, which he did a lot when SSA Keith was around.

Not that Arthur was jealous, because he had other things on his mind… he just couldn’t help think it was probably not all that professional on either of their parts.

When he finally let Curt drag him back to the hotel after the second day of coming up empty on his search, Arthur was ready to disconnect his brain for a while and sleep, but his brain had other ideas. It kept circling around what he did know about the case and what he didn’t, and the patterns that were forming on either side of that equation didn’t seem to make any sense, not even on a supernatural level. Still, he had to think there was at least a good chance it was a ghost they were dealing with, since there was no real physical explanation for everything, either.

As if reading his thoughts, something he seemed to be able to do with startling regularity, Curt said, “There’s something… off about this whole thing, don’t you think? Something hinky that doesn’t have to with ghosts or anything else except maybe a put-up?”

And despite the fact that Curt using the word hinky made Arthur flash on Scooby Doo for a moment, he had to admit that it was the thing that was keeping him from being sure this was supernatural; that off-ness, that lack of sense in the patterns. Still, there was so much that pointed to it being something outside the normal world, and who was to say that the supernatural had to make sense in any way? “There’s the fact that no one knows who any of these people are, that there’s no physical evidence left behind at the scene, that there’re no witnesses to the body dumps even though there were people around the area each time, the cadaveric spasm, and let’s not forget the maybe-ectoplasm that was on the last vic… what else could it be besides a ghost?”

Curt counted them off on his fingers, the index finger first. “There are John and Jane Does on cases all the time, and the fact that they’re _all_ unidentified makes me think it was an intentional thing on the part of the killer and that he had some way of knowing that they _wouldn’t_ be identified. Why would a ghost care if the victims were identified or not?”

The middle finger came with, “No physical evidence happens all the time, too. Sometimes by accident, but more likely that this person knows what gets looked for and takes care to not let it be found.”

The ring finger. “The ectoplasm is interesting, for sure, but an unidentified compound could mean a killer who’s either got a chemistry background or something else in that vein.”

The pinky and thumb waggled in counterpoint to each other while Curt said, “The cadaveric spasm is a total mystery, but the no witness thing just makes me think that this guy knows how to blend in. Each of the dump sites was in an area where warehouses are fairly common, so it’s not like a witness is going to remember one more guy pushing around large boxes, not as long as he doesn’t do anything to stand out. I haven’t completely gotten how he rigged the body that showed up after a search had already been done, but I think… with everything we’re seeing here, I’d say the chances of the killer being someone who knows law enforcement techniques is a lock, and the chances of them being one of the officers on the scene of that search is almost certain. So far, though, no one who was there’s been able to say for sure who searched that area. Apparently things were a little messy since they thought they were racing the clock, and assignments were handed out on the fly. But regardless of how he arranged it, I’m laying odds the body was at the dump site long before the phone call was even made, and this joker is just toying with us all.”

Now Curt’s gossiping with the other agents made sense to Arthur; Curt had suspected it was one of them and was trying to get information without giving away what he was doing. Arthur felt a little guilty about having assumed the worse, but then he figured Curt had to have his doubts about Arthur as well, especially since he had a counter to each of Arthur’s arguments. It was natural to question for them, both because of their jobs and what they’d already faced in trying to do them. Arthur let it go and focused on what Curt had suggested.

If their killer was someone in the field office, it did get rid of some of the inconsistencies that Arthur had been seeing, and even where there was no clear-cut answer about how something was being done, Curt’s suggestions were at least as reasonable as his. Arthur wasn’t so focused on the supernatural that he would ignore sense when he came across it, so he’d definitely keep it in mind while he investigated.

Still, the imp that lived inside Arthur’s brain (but that he was rarely all that comfortable letting out), couldn’t resist saying, “You just spit in the face of evidence, don’t you?” Arthur watched Curt’s face struggle between thinking he was joking and hoping he was before Arthur couldn’t hold it in any longer and started laughing.

Curt vowed revenge, but he was still smiling when he conveniently forget to order Arthur’s potstickers for their late night dinner of Chinese.

It wasn’t like they’d actually needed them, anyway, since there was enough food left over for a wholesome breakfast of cold pork fried rice even after Arthur had basically eaten himself into a carbohydrate coma. He laid on the bed feeling like one of those snakes you always see in the nature films, who looked like they were about to burst from whatever helpless creature they had eaten. He was almost asleep after a long couple of days and a big meal, when Curt managed to get an answer out of him he didn’t usually share.

“Why do you believe in UFOs and supernatural stuff, anyway? With the way you investigate, logical and orderly, backed by a lot of research, I’d have thought you’d be the type to need proof.”

Arthur almost laughed at that off-the-cuff bit of profiling, but it was true. He had needed proof. “Ten years ago, before I ever even thought of coming to the US or knew what the FBI was besides a set of letters, I was a spotty teen who didn’t fit in much of anywhere. I’d been kicked out of the house, was wandering the streets of London hoping… I don’t know, I guess just hoping to find someone who’d see me as I really was and still care. And pretty much completely by accident, I found them. A glam band that was barely more than a garage band, playing whatever gigs they could get and pretty much willing to accept anyone for what they were because they couldn’t be bothered to try to make them change. They were having far too much fun just living their lives to do that. I’d never met anyone like them.”

Even though he knew Curt wouldn’t tell anyone if he found out exactly what the rest of the story said about Arthur’s orientation, and would hardly judge him for it, Arthur was still glad that Pearl could easily be a girl’s name, not quite ready to share that part of himself with anyone. Softly, almost wistfully, he described the night that had changed his life. “It was just some rundown club in downtown London, glam already on its way out, but that night had still felt like magic, especially when Pearl took me to the roof and, well, relieved me of my virginity as it were. What happened after that… no one ever really believed me. They just said that Pearl was flighty in the first place, and no telling what had happened, or that I was just remembering what I’d seen on the acid we dropped.”

But Arthur knew it wasn’t the acid, since he’d mainly faked licking the smiley face Pearl had shoved at him, too afraid of messing up his first time to risk it. Arthur had thought the lights that he’d seen flashing across the sky when he was drifting in post-coital bliss were just something everyone saw after sex. Until the ship had shown up, anyway.

“They took us both on board, but everything was a blur. I remember lights and touches, but no pain and nothing… untoward. The last thing I remember before they took me back was Pearl’s voice saying it was all okay, and that we’d meet again one day. I woke up on the roof the next day. And ten years later Pearl’s still missing, just another druggie musician gone and run away to some other life, at least according to the police.”

Curt had a nostalgic look on his face, and Arthur remembered some of the stories they told about him and his group, also little more than a garage band, but popular on the fringe. Heroin, gay love, glitter and danger, Curt was never meant for the mainstream, and probably would have lived his life at that edge, or lost it early, if he hadn’t been in the wrong place at the wrong time and found out from the wrong end of things (from the painful end of things) what made serial offenders tick. Even with the gift for profiling that Curt had, that almost mind-reading that he seemed able to do, he’d have never made it into Hoover’s FBI, not with that past. He’d barely been acceptable to the new and improved version of the FBI as it was.

Not that Arthur would have been all that acceptable, either, not with the stir he’d created in London when he’d insisted Pearl had been taken by aliens. His parents had told the reporters things like _he always was a little odd_ and _we suspected he was doing the drugs all along_ , but had shied away from the homosexual angle, still most ashamed of that out of everything. When he’d felt full force what he could expect from most people when telling the truth, he’d learned to hide it from them. His sexuality, his alien encounter, what he thought or felt on just about everything.

It had taken coming across a case that was obviously an alien abduction, the victim left devastated both by what had happened and how people had reacted to him telling the truth about it, before Arthur had finally broken that silence, unwilling to do to someone else what had been done to him. Only his own near unnatural talent had saved him from losing his job, but Arthur had come to find the basement an excellent sanctuary, letting him keep hiding even while he told the truth.

But maybe he was tired of hiding. Or maybe he just felt he didn’t have to (or didn’t _want_ to) do that with Curt. And even though it was obvious that Curt wasn’t necessarily on board with the alien thing any more than he had been for the ghost, Arthur knew he’d made the right decision to tell him when Curt had answered, with that screwball optimism you wouldn’t expect someone like him to have, “Maybe if you keep looking, you really will find him one day.”

It was only after they’d turned in for the night, Curt’s breathing slowing into sleep and Arthur’s mind finally winding down, that Arthur realized that Curt had said ‘find _him_ one day.’ And maybe Arthur was developing his own screwball optimism, because he couldn’t help but think that casual reveal and acceptance was the hallmark of good things.

~*~

The next day, even with being aware of what Curt was doing, Arthur couldn’t help but feel a tiny bit put out by how blatant he was with the gossiping (with the _flirting_ , really), especially with Keith. He knew it was just part of Curt’s job, but there was the memory of late night Chinese and the intimacy of talking about his past with someone who would empathize even if he didn’t necessarily understand… and maybe Arthur _was_ just a tiny bit jealous if he were being completely honest.

He focused down on his work, determined to ignore what was going on outside the tiny little office they’d been assigned, and in the perverse way things always came to him, something strange hit him. All the victims hadn’t been on record. No fingerprints on file, no missing persons reports, nothing. While they did sometimes get cases where they couldn’t identify the vics, it was more often due to lack of physical evidence, such as the fingers being cut, or eaten away by predation after the bodies were dumped. Sadly, it was sometimes just quiet, unnoticeable people who’d never done anything to get fingerprinted for, and weren’t even much missed when they disappeared. But even with that, it just wasn’t normal to have multiple victims, with all their fingers present, who were _all_ Jane and John Does. 

Arthur remembered what Curt had said the night before, about the chances of the killer actually being one of their agents, and thought how convenient it would be for a killer who wanted, for whatever reason, victims that would be unidentified to have access to the FBI’s fingerprint records ahead of time. Either to choose a victim without a record or to erase a record that was there. Arthur didn’t have Curt’s knowledge of profiling, but that still potentially told him something about the killer right there. Erasing the prints would leave a trail and wasn’t something the field office people would likely have clearance for regardless, but even just running the fingerprint search would take either the help of the lab tech, which was unlikely since it would be likely to be remembered, or a certain amount of tech knowledge. 

And it was a knowledge that most agents, as well trained as they were, didn’t possess. Maybe one day, when computers became more commonplace, but right now the fact that Arthur could do that type of thing was just another reason he was looked at as weird, and he’d just bet it would be something that people would remember about their fellow agents.

He looked for Curt, wanting to fill him in, but couldn’t find him. Normally he’d take that in stride, but right now, with the scent in front of him, it irritated him instead. Knowing that he was impatient when he was on the trail of something didn’t mean he could actually _stop_ being impatient, and he wound up just leaving a note on the desk and going down to the computer lab to check for himself. 

Arthur searched the records, but there was no sign of deletions and no logs that showed who was using the computers when, either. He blew out a loud breath, wanting to laugh at himself for having expected instant answers just because he’d finally thought of something that could give them a break. He shrugged his shoulders to loosen the tension, trying to shake off the tug of _solve this now_ that he was far too prone to. He’d known it would probably take questioning the agents in the office, which is why he’d looked for Curt in the first place. He’d just have to go back and find him this time.

But Curt still wasn’t in the office or answering the phone at the hotel, and no one Arthur asked had seen him for a couple of hours. Arthur didn’t see Keith anywhere, either, and an uncharitable part of his brain wondered if they were off in some bathroom together, half the stories he’d heard about Curt revolving around semi-public sex in completely inappropriate places. He felt a stab of guilt when he remembered how accepting Curt had been of his own foibles, and reminded himself that gossip and fact were what separated good papers like Times of the Weird from rags like the Post. 

Keith walked by the office then, his fast stride towards the elevators showing he was likely on his way out, and Arthur almost let him go, but his curiosity about both Curt and the prints wouldn’t let him. Arthur caught up with him at the elevators, asking if he’d seen Curt while Keith impatiently hit the down button five times in a row. Keith looked puzzled for a moment, but then shook his head. “I haven’t seen him since this morning.”

The SSA was brusque, which was unusual for him. He’d been far more friendly and helpful than Calderon and most of the other agents since they’d arrived. If anything he’d given them too much information to work with, showering both Arthur and Curt with things they hadn’t even asked yet rather than withholding it like his boss tended to do, and Arthur wondered if the terseness was because of something Curt had done. 

Arthur looked at Keith, trying to see if he could pinpoint either what made him different from most of the agents they worked with or even what made Curt favor him so much, but all he saw was a clean-cut and blandly handsome man, a corn-fed blond and blue-eyed American stereotype, who’d probably played football in college and listed beer and hamburgers as two of the food groups. There was certainly no sign of heterosexual panic at being hit on by a _queer_. 

It wasn’t until after Arthur got on the elevator with Keith and asked him about agents with tech knowledge, only to have a gun pointed at him, that Arthur knew what Curt must have suspected all along. 

After Keith dragged him to a dark corner of the parking garage and knocked the gun against his head, Arthur didn’t know anything at all.

~*~

“It’s the Peter Principle,” Keith said.

Arthur didn’t answer him, the gag in his mouth and the shoulder that was digging into his already unsteady stomach stealing any reply except for the occasional moan.

He’d woken up in the trunk of a car, but had barely had a chance to figure out which way was up before the trunk lid popped open and too much bright light had flooded in, making the pounding headache and churning stomach he’d just registered kick up another notch. Discovering that he was gagged so tight it was cutting into his mouth and that his hands were cuffed in front of him came next, a veritable waterfall of unpleasant revelations, but it all felt distant, like they really were coming to him through a wall of water, heavy and pressing in all around him.

Keith hadn’t given him time to figure anything else out, just pulled him from the trunk and stood him on his feet, trying to push him in the direction of the humongous abandoned warehouse Keith had parked in front of. But Arthur had been too dizzy to do it without help, winding up on his ass, his stomach threatening to escape up his throat as both Keith and the building seemed to loom over him, blotting out everything but his misery.

Which is how Arthur had wound up slung over the guy’s shoulder like he was the lead in _The Perils of Pauline_ and about to be put on the railroad tracks. The fact that Arthur weighed a bit more than she probably had and that Keith was huffing and puffing like an old man at the exertion, was about the only good point Arthur could see to the whole thing.

It was a slow, staggering trek to wherever Keith meant to take Arthur, but instead of saving his breath, Keith started talking, apparently following the cliché of the gloating bad guy that was in just about every thriller ever made. He was explaining what he’d done and why, and doing it in far more detail than Arthur really cared about at the time, what with being more concerned with not becoming one of the victims himself.

“Calderon been promoted to the point where he couldn’t effectively do the job anymore, so he wasn’t going to be promoted any higher. At the same time, he had too much seniority to outright fire, either. So there we were, all of the agents under him, not able to move up in the chain locally, and not getting a high enough solve rate to get transferred out due to his incompetence. Or at least not able to get transferred to any office you’d actually want to go to,” Keith panted out as he worked his way up the loading ramp into the warehouse.

It wasn’t true, as Arthur knew, since he’d come out of the same office himself, and there’d been plenty of others who had as well. Calderon’s having been promoted past a point where he was good anymore, that might have had some validity to it, but it was more likely that the man’s petulant personality was what was holding him back. There really wasn’t any point in telling Keith that, though, even if Arthur could have. Arthur had no idea how the man passed for sane the way he did, but just the fact that Keith had started his confession about being a serial killer with a gripe about the lack of promotions in his office said that the sane thing was definitely all an act.

The litany of crazy kept up as Keith made his slow way through the building. How Keith had decided to _pretend_ to be a serial killer, and one with a supernatural bent at that, to lure Arthur to the case. Once Arthur was on the scene, then Keith had planned to kill him, too, framing Calderon for the whole thing. Calderon’s obsessive dislike of Arthur was well known in the office, as well as the fact that his wife had taken off after she’d had enough of his bitterness, so no one would find it hard to believe the man had snapped. Keith had planned to be the one to solve it, getting the credit for handling a big case and opening up a higher job position all in one blow.

Arthur moved his head around, trying to see where they were going or if there was anything around he could use as a weapon, and testing how dizzy he was at the same time, but he saw nothing but dirty walls and useless trash, all of which spun in circles as he watched, so it wasn’t much help overall. He guessed that Keith chose Arthur as a victim because it wasn’t only _Calderon_ who resented Arthur’s transfer to DC, but that wasn’t any help, either.

After that they were moving down a long hall, the unsteadiness of Keith’s steps not helping with Arthur’s dizziness at all, and the confession was coming out in shorter and shorter pieces, air dragged into straining lungs in between. The technical aspects like the fingerprint searches, and finding victims from bunches of different neighborhoods, even spreading out over the state and into Connecticut and New Jersey. How the spontaneous rigor had been a fluke on the first one, but too big a lure to pass up, and how it had taken so many more tries, trial and error, bodies piling up and starting to smell before he’d gotten victim number two right. That’s why the month wait between vics; because it had taken that long to find potential victims, then run the fingerprint searches to make sure they couldn’t be identified, so there was no way to trace their movements and no chance someone would remember this FBI agent hanging around, and then even more time to get one with spontaneous rigor. With all of that a month had barely been long enough. It had gone faster after a while, the right combination of terrorizing the vics and a high enough dose of epinephrine getting him his ‘ghost’ rigor in only fifteen to twenty tries as a usual rule.

It had been too faint to really recognize when they’d first entered the warehouse, but Arthur could smell it stronger now, the cloying smell of blood and death. Keith had mentioned the numbers so casually, the only strain in his voice the exercise he was getting, but it terrified Arthur, the thought of all that death sitting somewhere so close. The fact that the killer didn’t care in the least about the fear and pain he’d caused, not even taking some kind of sick joy in it, a means to the end of getting a better job… Arthur couldn’t even take it in it was so wrong. A thought process more alien than the actual aliens he’d seen had had, and Arthur couldn’t even guess how Keith functioned so normally.

He tried ignoring Keith for a while, went back to looking around for some kind of break, but he kept seeing movement behind them and out of the corners of his eyes, like something was following them, and it would just be Arthur’s luck to be kidnapped by a serial killer only to be killed by some random crazy hanging around in a warehouse that smelled like an abattoir.

It was hard to ignore Keith, anyway, who was apparently thrilled at being able to finally talk about his _brilliant_ plan after having to hide it for so long, and who was definitely angry that Curt and Arthur had almost ruined it for him. “I never even thought about the fingerprint searches being a clue. And someone at the office would definitely mention that I could do them and that I’d spent a lot of time in the computer room these last few months. Not that it would have mattered, I guess, since that fucker Curt had already guessed the whole thing anyway. I wish I’d had the chance to take my time with him and make him scream before he died. After all that time I wasted talking to him, making sure I planted enough doubt about Calderon that no one would question it when I solved the case, and he was just playing me the whole time.”

There was more after that, about Curt and what Keith wanted to do to him, and while Arthur hadn’t studied psychology like Curt had, he still could guess that a lot of Keith’s anger stemmed from repressed homosexual impulses and latent attraction and all that crap. But Arthur kept getting caught on that _take my time with him and make him scream before he died_ , his mind going over it and over it, like the way you messed with a sore tooth even though you knew it would only make it worse. It hurt, much more than Arthur even wanted to look at, and the only thing keeping him from going crazy was the ambiguity of what Keith had said. Not _I killed Curt_ outright, but that he’d wanted a chance to take his time with him before he died. And, okay, it was reaching, a desperate attempt at denial, but it was all Arthur had, alone with a madman and getting closer to an overwhelming smell of death with every jarring step.

It was enough to drive Arthur to ignore the dizziness, to ignore the way the world was so hard to take in while hanging upside down and swinging back and forth, his head pounding with the blood that had built up in it and the headache he’d already had. The quick flickers of movement he kept seeing behind them were irritating, like a TV playing when you were trying to read, and weren’t helping with his focus in the least. He ignored it all as best he could, pushing himself up a little, holding himself steady by gripping Keith’s jacket with his cuffed hands, but Keith, already worked up from thinking about Arthur and Curt throwing off his plan, just dug his fingers into Arthur’s legs, pinching and twisting the flesh until Arthur let go, the pain and the stench that was all around them threatening to make his stomach finally rebel, and Arthur didn’t want to find out how that would work with the gag in place.

Before Arthur could consider another plan of action, Keith pushed through some heavy swinging doors and stepped into what looked like Hell, even what little of it Arthur could see. It had probably been a boiler room at some point, but everything had been torn out, leaving a large space that was now half-filled with piles of bodies. Even having known they’d be there, Arthur was still too shocked at the sight of all that death to fully take it in. He had the fleeting thought that they were so neatly stacked, like cords of firewood; only the pools of decomp that spread out across what little floor space there was left and the constant droning of flies and insects ruined the order Keith had tried to keep. 

Then reality kicked back in, and Arthur started planning, most of it centered around not dying. Keith, already unsteady from all the work he’d been doing, swayed alarmingly, likely from the smell, and Arthur had to grab hold of his jacket again to keep from being dumped in the pools of things he’d rather not think about. 

Before Arthur could put any other plan in action and before Keith could either start pinching again or actually fall, the doors slammed open again. Keith’s back was to them, but Arthur could clearly see who it was that came in. However his second big shock in just under a minute wasn’t helping him process any better, so it took a moment to register. But even after a second look it was still Curt, blood streaked down his head and face and liberally staining his clothes, looking like the lead in a movie that could be titled _Attack of the Vengeful Spirit From Hell!_. As the doors swung shut behind him, he reached one not quite steady hand out to Arthur, right before the full impact of the smell kicked in and he doubled over, losing the battle that Arthur was still fighting with everything he had.

Keith finally got control of his own stomach, spinning around to see what was happening, but that’s when everything else happened, pretty much all at the same time. 

In a fit of pragmatism that he wasn’t usually all that prone to, Arthur used the weapons he had to hand. Mainly the cuffed hands that were still holding onto Keith’s jacket, conveniently hanging right near the waist of his pants, and while it had been years since Arthur had had to do that kind of fighting, you never really forgot how to give a really painful wedgie. Keith dropped like a rock as Arthur pulled on his underwear for all he was worth, landing them in one of the puddles, though thankfully with Keith taking the worst of it.

Right as Keith was going down, the doors swung open once more, Calderon and a bunch of agent running into the room, guns drawn and faces grim, the cavalry arrived at last. They were a sight for sore eyes, especially since Arthur doubted the wedgie was going to keep Keith down for long, and he was so happy to see Calderon for once that he only barely minded when the asshole followed Curt’s lead and puked on the floor right next to him.

~*~

Curt and Arthur were both taken to the hospital to get looked at and cleaned up. Arthur had just had to get bandaged and fed some codeine and antibiotics (since apparently human bodies were basically toxic dumps just waiting to happen), and then he’d been cut loose. Instead of going, though, he’d camped out by the pay phone in the waiting room, monopolizing it to get updates from the agents at the scene in between fretting over what was taking them so long with Curt.

It turned out that it wasn’t so much that Curt was seriously hurt, but rather that he was a seriously bad patient, constantly saying he was fine and trying to leave, even while the gash on his head was being stitched. The doctors were pretty adamant that he should be admitted for observation, and Calderon (most likely afraid of the administrative fiasco it would be if he let Curt leave and then Curt died on him) pretty much ordered him to stay, but Curt still looked ready to bolt the first time anyone turned their back on him.

Arthur watched it all, torn between wanting Curt safe in the hospital and knowing, if even half the things Arthur had read about Curt’s childhood were true, that Curt had good reasons to want to go. 

It was the puppy dog eyes, darker than their usual blue-green, but just as compelling in a way, that finally led to Arthur helping Curt escape. And, really, they could have just checked him out, Calderon’s authority not enough to keep them there if they insisted on going, but it was actually kind of fun to watch Curt sneak down the hall into a room marked _Staff Only_ , coming out a minute later wearing stolen scrubs, and it made walking out the front door, into a night that both of them could so easily have never seen, all the sweeter.

Back at the hotel room, Curt grabbed a bottle of beer out of the mini fridge and fell on his bed, sighing in relief. “Home at last.”

It was funny, since the room was about as generic as they came, but Arthur felt that faint touch of _home_ as well; long unfamiliar anywhere besides his safe little basement. He ignored the question of _why_ he felt that way because he didn’t want to think about it yet, and because there was a more immediate worry on his mind. “Should you be drinking that? The doctor said you had a concussion.”

Curt waved off the concern. “I’m an old hand at getting knocked around. Once I get over the puking stage, it’s pretty much over except for the headache. Which the beer doesn’t help with, really, but it does make it so I don’t care.” 

They laughed at the joke, almost anything funny after the day they’d had, but then the room fell quiet as Arthur grabbed his own beer, lying on the bed next to Curt instead of going to his own. They let the silence lie with them as they drank, focused on the case being solved, on not being dead, and on trying to drink lying down without spilling beer all over the place.

There were a lot of questions in Arthur’s mind: why hadn’t Curt waited for the other agents to catch up before he came after Keith, how had he even managed to follow them considering how much the concussion must have been affecting his ability to see, let alone walk, and what the hell had taken Calderon so long that he actually arrived _behind_ someone who was wobbling like a Weeble. But none of them really mattered in the long run. Curt had managed it in some way, and between that and Arthur’s amazing wedgie skills and Calderon finally getting his head out of his ass, they were all okay, which was about as good a result as you could hope for most days. 

There was one question that was nagging Arthur, though. “Calderon said someone found you staggering out of one of the empty offices right after I left with Keith. If you were upstairs while he was driving away… how did you know where to find us?”

As close as they were lying, Arthur could see Curt’s eyes really well. The flecks of blue and green that could still make Arthur’s heart give a little pang even after days of exposure, the uneven pupils that just fueled Arthur’s worry, and the flicker of uncertainty that spread across Curt’s face at the question. The uncertainty flickered away as quickly as it came, Curt just shrugging and saying, “Instinct, I guess.”

Dismissing something he didn’t want to think about in the same way Arthur didn’t look too closely about why he felt at home, lying here on the hideous pattern of the hotel bed spread, his free hand just barely brushing up against Curt’s stolen scrubs. 

Arthur shrugged too, letting it go. He was pretty sure he knew the answer already. Had suspected something from the way Curt always seemed to know when Arthur was hungry or needed a break, or from the way Curt could read people’s motives and feelings so easily, in a way even other profilers couldn’t seem to. It was also there in the way he could get people to tell him things they probably hadn’t meant to. The agents at the office hadn’t noticed anything, but Arthur hadn’t really talked about Pearl to anyone, not beyond trying to get them to believe what had happened. Not before he’d met Curt, anyway.

It had felt good to talk about it, even as much as the memory still hurt. It had even helped to make the memory not quite so bitter. So when one beer led to another and another still, and Curt was fighting sleep with everything he had, Arthur distracted him with questions about the hospital he’d been sent to as a kid. Let Curt talk about what had been in the papers and what hadn’t; slowly at first, disjointedly, but building until it was almost poring out of Curt, their last beer sweating and forgotten in his hand.

 _That he didn’t just deck Calderon and run out of the hospital right from the beginning was pretty much a miracle_ , Arthur thought when Curt was winding down. It had probably hurt Curt to talk about it, had certainly hurt Arthur to hear it, and he wondered if Curt had felt that strong urge to somehow make it better after Arthur had talked about Pearl. Not that there was any real way to make it better. Not the the suicidal thoughts and severe depression Curt hadn’t had _until_ he’d been committed, nor the extreme claustrophobia he got when he was locked in anywhere. But Curt had adapted to his own foibles years ago, had learned to live _around_ them in a way that Arthur wished he had.

“I still can’t stand the smell of hospitals. Not as bad as Keith’s abattoir, of course, but still disgusting. Like the false sense of hope they always try to project.” 

Curt’s voice was soft, exhaustion slurring the edges of his syllables even more than his usual lazy way of talking. Arthur was feeling the long day as well, and it was probably that even more than thinking about what Curt had said that made Arthur forget that he’d decided to let the psychic thing go. So instead he wound up saying, “It was probably worse for you than it was for most patients, since with your empathic ability, you would have been bombarded by the fears and pain of everyone around you. It must have been like a kind of hell for you.”

Keith’s abattoir, as they’d all been calling it, had been like hell for Arthur, and he shuddered at both his own memory of it and the one he imagined for Curt. Right up until he realized what he’d just implied. Then he shuddered again, waiting for the ridicule he’d just opened himself up for.

Curt did laugh, but there was nothing malicious in it. Disbelief for sure, but an amused one, willing to let Arthur believe whatever he wanted. All he said was, “I will admit that sometimes I get… I guess you could call it feelings about what people really mean or what they’re hiding or things like that, but that’s just years of having to watch people closely, never knowing what direction the next blow-“ he cut himself off, obviously saying more than he’d meant to and taking the last swig of his beer to cover it.

Arthur was pretty sure it was more than coming from an abusive home or having been out on the streets too long, as much as those things might hone a person’s ability to read others. He was willing to let Curt have his doubts, though. He could always work on him later, back at Arthur’s office. Back at _their_ office, which wasn’t quite as scary a thought anymore.

He sat up, about to head for his own bed and some much needed sleep, but a hand on his leg, slowly sliding upwards in a quiet invitation, stopped him. There was nothing the least bit tired or haunted in Curt’s voice when he said, “I _can_ tell what you're feeling, though. I can tell you think I'm hot. I can tell that you like me.”

 _It's more than that_ , Arthur thought, not wanting to say it out loud. Subtler than lust, stronger than attraction, a hook in his heart that could grow into so much more if he didn’t stop it. But he didn't really want to. 

Not quite as scary anymore still meant it was _kind of_ scary not being alone in his basement, even if he liked it. But it had definitely been good to have someone around who would watch his back when he was too focused (or in too much trouble) to do it himself. And he really did _like_ Curt. He was pretty sure that wasn’t the kind of like that Curt was asking for right now, though, because while Arthur might not _feel_ things the way Curt did, he could read clues. And the erection that Curt had got when Arthur basically manhandled him out of the car and into their hotel room had been a pretty big clue.

Arthur could ruin the moment by talking about the long term when right now was all that mattered. It was, sadly, the kind of thing he was prone to. But it really had been a bad day, and Curt wasn’t the only one who wanted to end it on a happier note than it had started, so instead of worrying about what came after for once, he just waggled his eyebrows and asked, “I know you know what I’m feeling, but do you know that I know what _you’re_ feeling?”

It was silly and stupid, but Curt took it in stride the same way he had everything else about Arthur, just smiling as he answered, “I know that you know what I’m feeling. I pushed it into your leg hard enough when we were coming in. The question is, do you want to feel it, too?”

It was likely a bad idea, and both of them knew it. But there are a lot of other things Arthur knew, too. He knew how to look for little clues in big messes. He knew how to tell what’s a good story in the _Times of the Weird_ and what’s just bogus. He knew seventeen different conspiracy theories for Kennedy’s assassination, and that was just off the top of his head. What he’d never really known, not with any level of comfort, was how to deal with just being Arthur. Really Arthur, and not the screw-up son, or the one who was left behind, or the wunderkind investigator, or any of a thousand other masks he wore all the time. 

Curt, who had never really worn a mask in his life, not since someone had stolen them all away from him, just lay on the bed, the hand on Arthur’s leg inviting, but not insistent, not rushing him at all. 

It would probably wind up with them being either fired or as a featured story in some cheap tabloid that didn't even have the decency to put out a good Bigfoot story from time to time, but Arthur couldn't really bring himself to care. He turned to his side, running his hand through non-regulation bleached blond hair that still faintly smelled of the antiseptic soap the hospital had used to clean them off, and kissed Curt like he had wanted to since the first moment he came into Arthur’s basement.

Arthur didn’t want to just believe anymore.

/story


End file.
